Temporal demarcations of the verb “durar”: a valencial-combinatorial analysis

Abstract

Time is one of the elements of the verbal predicate which has attracted less interest in reflections on language and grammar, because it was usually categorized as a marginal component within the clause. This paper aims at showing an overview of the mechanisms of temporal delimitations in the Spanish verb durar, establishing what the status of this kind of complement is in terms of argument structure, the marking of specific syntactic functions and the specific forms adopted by them in the actual use. Based on a valency perspective and corpus linguistic methods, our study reconsiders the role played by temporal components in predicate constructions of durar using frequency and co-occurrence data provided by the Spanish corpus created by Mark Davies. The analysis of the temporal complements of durar evidences that time is an essential constituent of their meaning and must be considered as an integral feature of their verbal valence, despite being an element that takes different representational forms in discourse. Viewing the phenomenon of verbal temporal demarcations from this point of view allows us to check how time is conceptualized in Spanish in actual usage, to overcome the concept of temporal specifications as marginal elements of the verbal predication and to open new angles on linguistic research in Spanish Automatic Translation or Spanish Second Language Acquisition.